Sunday, 8 November 2015

Fundraising: How our group did it

Wanting to
help refugee families start new lives in Canada - under Canada's Private Sponsorship
of Refugees Program - first means fundraising.

Of course,
fundraising is only one part of the resettlement process; there are already
good resources to help groups learn how to do the
many other things that need to be done, such find and furnish accommodations,
navigate the healthcare and education systems, even how to make an airport
welcome sign.

We’ve not,
however, seen a single resource on how to fundraise. But this blog post is also
not a “how to fundraise for your refugee family” either. It’s something between
“how we made fundraising happen” and “how fundraising happened to us.” It’s a
case study: a case in how our group - one of hundreds of private sponsorship
groups - has raised over $50,000 so far to resettle a family of eight. Because we're not done. Human need is human
need, and there's still a lot more out there unfortunately. So while we've
raised enough for one family (from Syria) and are awaiting their imminent
arrival, we continue to fundraise because we intend to sponsor and
settle additional families. Our overall goal is to raise as much as possible.
More money = more refugee families safe in Canada.

A lot of
other groups have asked us how we've done it so far, and we find the same
situation over and again: people who are fearless about assuming responsibility
for a refugee family from somewhere they may not have heard of before recently,
who will find and furnish shelter for them, and, for the next year, commit to
supporting the family each step of the way as they integrate into life in
Canada. All this the sponsor groups seem to take in stride.

But what
scares them? The FUNDRAISING.

And so here's
the fundraising part of The Ripple Refugee Project story to now. Some of this
may read as superb luck meeting opportunity. It was. But there's an equal
amount of opportunity meeting preparedness. If you’re also part of a group
trying to fundraise for a refugee family, know that you have just as much luck,
opportunity, and preparedness waiting for you as we did. It’s all a ripple
effect when you want something so much for other people.

Here’s how we
raised the money:

1. We gelled
as a team. We didn’t all
know each other four months ago, and together had taken on a big mandate. Our
motivation is part of our shared common humanity, but still: the work must
get done. We’ve also signed a Memorandum of Understanding amongst ourselves.

It’s taken us
two or three months to really get humming, because we made sure to put in
strong administrative processes before diving into the fundraising. Form, norm,
storm.

We’ve a
strong leader/chairperson in our group’s founder, and also made sure we had a
firm understanding of our own roles. We’re know that fundraising is
social, and that fundraising culture starts within - all our meetings start
with a potluck dinner, which we linger over. Because it’s over these dinners
that the culture of our group formed and is still forming, based on the
different backgrounds, attitudes, and expectations each member brings. Because
people are different, groups are all different. We continue to monitor our
group dynamic and tweak our approach and philosophy as we deepen our
relationships and understand each other more.

2. We set our
financial goal. In educating
ourselves on our sponsorship options as private citizens, we learned there were
two streams we could consider:

Named Case: where private citizens
identify and put forth name(s) of people who should be considered refugees
to bring to Canada. In this stream, it takes at least 12 months for the
government to review the file, and the process could take years before
resettlement is a reality. And the full cost of sponsorship is shouldered
by the private citizens.

BVOR (“Blended Visa Office-Referred”
program): a three-way partnership among the UNHCR, Government of Canada,
and private sponsorship groups. In this scenario, people's cases have
already been reviewed and deemed eligible for refugee status in Canada.
The advantage of this stream is the timeline is short: the file of the
refugee has already been approved, and in many cases they’re ready to
travel. Best of all, the government will pay around 40% of the cost of
resettling.

Originally,
we were targeting a family of four, which costs $27,000. As the government
would be kicking in $10,000, we needed $17,000 in an account. As we have a
large group (17 members) we felt that everyone’s portion was doable (though we
didn’t then and have never monitored each group members’ fundraising progress;
in notionally dividing the goal by the number of group members, we felt success
was doable). $17,000 was our original fundraising goal to sponsor a family of
four (though the situation changed for us).

3. We created
a Bridge Fund. This
was money that was on loan by us, Ripple Refugee Project members. Before we
could even put our hand up to apply to sponsor a family, we had to have the
money in our account. At the same time, we decided we didn’t want to start
soliciting with a general pitch. We felt as a group that our fundraising would
be most effective if we had a profile of “our” family and their story. It was a
conundrum: we couldn’t get a profile until we had raised a lot of money, and
yet we didn’t want to fundraise until we had the family's profile. So we put
the money in ourselves on loan to trigger getting matched with a specific
family whose story we could tell. As donations come in, members are
reimbursed or decide to just leave their loans as additional gifts.

4. We created
a web presence through our blog and Facebook page. These establish our
legitimacy, we think, and also give us a place to solicit online donations, and
update donors on our progress. They also give the outside world a way to
contact us.

5. We ensured
financial accountability and donor stewardship. We developed
financial controls and
wrote a financial policy, which is public. We’re always updating our donor FAQ
(“how will you disburse money to the family?” or “what happens if you raise
more money than your stated goal?”). And we’ve started sending email updates to
our donor list as we get meaningful information to report.

7. We got
adopted. After seeing
the picture of lifeless Aylan on the Turkish beach, Dr. Jennifer Bryan,
emergency physician at University Health Network, sent out an email to a group
of 70 doctors, suggesting that they together should help with this humanitarian
crisis. On the distribution list was Raghu Venugopal, just fresh from his
national media appearance on Ripple's behalf. At that point, we’d been matched
with our family, and Raghu was able to tell his colleague, Jennifer, this news
and suggested the UHN group of doctors work through The Ripple Refugee Project.

Now, the
family we’d just been matched with was a special case: three generations
comprising of eight family members, one of whom has mobility issues. Our
fundraising goal had just necessarily more than doubled, but the UHN doctors
agreed it made sense to partner with a larger family and one with medical
needs. As individuals, the doctors pledged a total amount together of $44,000
(THANK YOU AGAIN AND MERCI, UHN DOCTORS!).

Traditionally,
refugee sponsorship has been done predominantly by the church/synagogue/mosque
model. In this age, it makes sense that a congregation of doctors also fulfils
this role.

8. We got the
ability to give our donors tax receipts. One of our members, a
public nurse, is also a Ryerson graduate and we were accepted as part of
the Ryerson University Lifeline Syria
Challenge campaign. After the media interest, this was the
other huge breakthrough to help our fundraising: our donors were able to
receive tax receipts, and we could take advantage of Ryerson’s online donation
page and gift processing. Thank you Ryerson!

9. We
solicited donations. We
finally had momentum and gift processing capability. Through letters, email,
face-to-face meetings and by social media, we talked about our project all the
time, and asked for donations. Through Ryerson, we get a weekly confidential
update on new donors to our fund (without showing the individual amounts).

10. We’re
always motivated by the ripple effect. You just never know what can happen. The friend of
one of our members saw the solicitation request on Facebook, and forwarded it
to a friend. Who sent it to another friend. Who showed it to a client. This
client came forward and pledged up to $1 million to resettle 20 families (note:
this philanthropist will not be working through our group. There's no way we
can manage more than one family at a time).

The
concentric circles of our ripple effect also manifest in the hours we spend
speaking at rotary clubs and with other private sponsorship groups just
starting out. We aim to work in the open, and have a public Google drive with
all the documents we've created that others may find useful.

And we hope
that if you’re in such a group, that you find our fundraising story inspiring.
And if you’re not, that you consider forming your own group to resettle one
family of the four million refugees who've had to flee their home country,
or making a donation.

The Ripple Refugee Project is a Toronto-based private refugee sponsorship group that was founded in May 2015 with the goal of sponsoring refugees to come to Canada, to share lessons learned about private sponsorship and to do advocacy work around Canada's refugee response.